Archive: Inner City Dad

by Steve | Jul 19, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Inner City Dad

Keith Johnson and His Vision for a Neighborhood

By Rober Moeller

It was a hot, sticky July night in the inner-city. The atmosphere was cordial, but guarded, among the racially-mixed audience that had gathered to hear a Christian musician. Without warning a middle-aged man, obviously intoxicated, jumped on to the stage, grabbed a microphone, and began singing a rambling rendition of a familiar gospel song. The white musician put down his guitar, took a step back, and glanced nervously around as if to say, “someone please help.” But the concert organizers were equally unnerved. They knew that one wrong move on stage could touch off an ugly scene.

As the crowd held its breath, a young black teenager appeared on the stage out of nowhere, walked over to the intoxicated man, shook his hand, and quietly led him off the stage.

You could almost hear the sigh of relief go up from the crowd. The music resumed, and the tensions on the blacktop quickly dissipated. The concert, and the church’s image in the community, had been rescued by the quick-thinking actions of a 17-year-old named Keith Johnson. Today, 15 years later, Keith Johnson is still a reconciler within his community and church. He is now the associate pastor of the lively and energetic Park Avenue United Methodist Church in downtown Minneapolis.

Keith and his wife, Andrea Thurston, are working to model the joys and struggles of Christ-centered family life with their three boys, Kyle, Taylor, and Andrew.

“The task of role-modeling is not one that comes naturally,” says Keith. “I was raised in a single-parent family. I’ve struggled to learn what it means to be an effective and involved husband and dad.”

Overcoming difficulties is nothing new to Keith. He has overcome a fatherless home, a predominantly white culture that treated him either as a novelty or a nuisance, and a depressed neighborhood that dared anyone to do anything more than just survive.

A father’s leaving home is an emotional earthquake, difficult to measure except in seismic terms. Keith’s dad left when he was seven-years-old and it registered a 9.0 on the family’s Richter scale—destroying the security and stability of his home.

“I felt as if I were on an island by myself, with enormous responsibilities,” he remembers. Two things were clear—he was now on his own, and he was now the man of the house.

Prejudice at the Pool

Minnesota is primarily a Scandinavian culture where the telephone directory has thousands of listings for the name Johnson. But to be black and named Johnson puts you in a category all your own.

Keith recalls being part of an experimental program that sent young minority children into the Minnesota countryside to experience farm life during the summer.

“When we would go into town, people would gather around me and just stare. I suspect several of them had never seen a black person before. One woman stepped up with a camera and took a picture of me before I knew what was happening.”

But at times, simple curiosity changed to raw prejudice. “The second summer I was out in the country I went swimming with the white family I was living with. As soon as I climbed into the pool, everyone else started climbing out. It’s the first time in my life I had ever been called a ‘nigger.’ Even though the neighborhood I came from was poor, I was relieved to get back home and just be one of the kids again.”

In junior high, Keith ran into someone that would profoundly change his life. As he was walking down the hall one day, he noticed a girl reading a book. Her name happened to be Angel.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The Bible,” she replied. “And it says that if you don’t become a Christian you will go to hell.”

Not surprisingly, Keith was shaken up. He asked what he needed to do to become a Christian.

“Go home and ask Jesus into your heart,” she said matter-of-factly.

Keith took her advice seriously. He went home, got on his knees and prayed, “God, I don’t know who you are. But Angel says that I need a ticket to heaven. So I’m going to invite Jesus into my life right now. Please come in.”

With little more than the advice of a ninth-grade girl to steer him toward God, Keith Johnson met Jesus Christ. While working the next day at a super market, Keith noticed that a woman had dropped a $20 dollar bill on the floor. He picked it up, went over and tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, “Here, you dropped this.” She was so surprised she just took the money and walked out. The next day at school he found Angel and said, “I’m a Christian! I found $20 dollars and gave it back.”

The next winter Keith received a brochure in the mail from Park Avenue UM Church announcing a trip to Florida for teenagers. This trip would be Keith’s first church experience. He remembers looking around the bus and seeing something very unusual; black and white kids sitting side by side. “I sensed a great openness and love toward me from the staff,” he recalls. “This church was different.”

Slowly Keith began to take on leadership responsibilities in the youth program at Park Avenue. “I remember sharing the gospel with a young man sitting on the top of the church bus one day,” says Keith. “He prayed to receive Christ while perched up there on the roof. It was a tremendous experience to realize that God could use me.”

Leaving Pharaoh’s Court

When Keith graduated from high school, he attended a Christian college far from the city. Although he enjoyed his new suburban surroundings, the call of God began to disturb his peaceful life.

“I began feeling a burden for the community I had grown up in,” he recalls. “Like Moses who decided to leave Pharaoh’s court, I knew I needed to go back and live with my people who were in need.”

As Keith’s love for his community blossomed, so did his love for Andrea, a beautiful young woman he had met on his Florida trip. “I fell head over heels,” he remembers. It was easy to understand why Keith had become so attracted to Andrea. Her grace and beauty had twice earned her the title of runner-up in the Miss Teenage Minnesota Pageant.

Shortly after Andrea and he were married, Keith took a sales position with a major corporation. Keith’s energy, gentle way with people, and natural charisma earned him promotions.

One day a district sales manager offered him a position that in three years would boost his salary to $70,000 a year. But there was a catch. The manager told him point-blank, “For two years, you’re going to have to give your heart and soul to the company.” With the birth of their first son only weeks away, Keith couldn’t see sacrificing his family for a career jump-start. He turned it down.

God again reminded him of his old neighborhood, prompting him, along with Andrea, to pray for an opportunity to return. Not long after that, Keith became program director for a ministry to teenagers in Minneapolis.

Sensing the need for further theological training, Keith resigned his position after three years and enrolled at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. As the weeks unfolded, Keith discovered that God had more in mind for him than just studying theology.

“The Lord began to dig down deep into my life and deal with the scars and pain of my childhood,” says Keith. “God began challenging me, an adult child of an alcoholic, toward honesty, truth, and confession. Then, on a Palm Sunday during a private spiritual/retreat, God specifically called me to the pastorate.”

As graduation time grew near, both Keith and Andrea knew home, not as teenage kids from the neighborhood this time, but as a husband and wife team committed to preaching the gospel and serving the community for Jesus Christ.

De-mythologizing Black Families

One of the first challenges Keith has taken on at Park Avenue is dealing with the myths and misconceptions regarding black families in the 1990s.

“One major misconception is the idea that urban families don’t care for their children as much as suburban parents do,” he says. “People need to realize that inner-city moms and dads do care. If they’re not home to take care of their kids, it isn’t because they’re apathetic, it’s because they’re struggling to survive. Urban folks do care, but because of their economic plight, many are forced to work day and night just to stay alive. That does not leave much time for parenting.”

Another myth Keith challenges is the idea that strong, black fathers don’t exist in the city. “They do in fact exist,” he asserts. “There are several black fathers in our church who are doing a marvelous job of raising their families.”

Keith and his wife have found particular encouragement from an older African American couple at Park Avenue, Bill and Beverly Cottman. “They’ve done a wonderful job of raising their children,” says Keith. “They could appear on any talk show and give advice on the right way to raise kids. As far as I’m concerned, they’re experts on the subject.”

Keith rejects the idea that there is a great difference between urban parents and their suburban counterparts with regard to their value systems. “We value monogamy, chastity, and honesty—so-called traditional values—just like everyone else. What’s usually lacking is available role models to show how to instill these values in our children.”

“I’m trying to address the needs of African-American families,” says Keith. “I called together the African-American men of the church to fellowship and talk with one another. In light of the Rodney King incidents, I felt it was important we discuss what positive steps we could take in the community.”

Keith and fellow black staff member Chris McNair are working to mobilize the black males at Park Avenue to become involved in the lives of young boys who have no father at home. Chris has begun a program called “Simba” (Young Lions) where young boys in the neighborhood are connected with older black men from the church who serve as mentors.

Doing It Right This Time

Keith realizes that if he is going to be the kind of father his boys need, it will require vigilance and sacrifice. “I guard my day off. One morning a week I care for our two year-old. One Sunday a month I sit with my family during the worship service. One day a month I actually spend time at school in the classroom with my children. Perhaps most important, every Monday night Andrea and I go out for a date.”

Remembering his own experience of growing up fatherless, Keith is determined to give his own boys a different life from the one he had known as a child. He views it as an opportunity to do it right this time, “God has given me the chance to replay the joy and excitement of the childhood I missed. My goal is to enjoy them, and to shape three future fathers and grandfathers who will be a blessing to their families, the society, and the church. But without Christ, I couldn’t do it.”

“I’m on a journey,” continues Keith. “I didn’t have good role models. I didn’t have people to show me the way. But God is meeting that need through the body of believers. As the Scriptures say, ‘God sets the lonely in families’ (Psalm 68:6). I’m thankful for the larger family God has placed us in at Park Avenue United Methodist Church. It’s a tremendous learning experience.”

Robert Moeller is a contributing editor with Leadership Journal and president of the Wordsmith Group, Inc.

Archive: Whither Sunday School?

by Steve | Jul 16, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Whither Sunday School?

By Riley B. Case

The United Methodist Publishing House recently released results of a study in an attempt to explain why UM Sunday school curriculum sales have decreased by 67 percent over a 30-year period. Sales have plummeted from 31 million units per year in the early 1960s to 11 million units in 1992. For those of us who have invested prayers and efforts over those thirty years, desiring to bridge the gap between the UM Sunday school materials and the evangelical constituency of the UM Church, there is a sense of sadness.

The reasons given for the decline sound all too familiar. Indeed, they are a classic church bureaucratic response. There is no admission that there is a problem with the product. Nor is there any suggestion that the people producing the curriculum are out of touch with people in the pews. Even while reporting on the disastrous decline, the news release claims that grass-roots complaints about biblical biases in the material have been addressed.

According to the study and the ensuing discussion, the problem has to do with factors like the economy (the economy?), television, photocopying machines (can we believe this?), membership decline (perhaps the result as well as the cause for curriculum decline), staff reductions leaving fewer persons to promote the material, and the scuttling of the old United Methodist Council on Youth Ministries (a radical group that was openly critical of the Sunday school as an institution).

These are poor answers to a serious problem. The Curriculum Resources Committee is one of the few agencies in the church that has its effectiveness measured by a bottom line. Unfortunately, the Board of Global Ministries and the seminaries do not have to be judged by the same bottom line. Sales are market-driven. Either the product is not meeting needs, or someone else is doing it better. It’s that simple.

Declining curriculum sales are indicative of the problem of the denomination. Methodism is an evangelical movement gone awry. The crisis is not of recent origin. The Boards of Education of both the northern and southern Methodist Churches were among the first agencies to commit themselves in the 1920s to “modernism,” an approach that indicated a willingness to make adaptations in the faith in order to communicate to the modem world. Any approach to faith that was not swept up by modernism was labeled “fundamentalism,” an ideology which, according to one of my seminary professors in the 1950s, “was an anachronism, and would be gone in another generation.”

Many of us wondered why traditional Methodism, as we had always known it, was now labeled “fundamentalism.” By whatever name, there was a lot of it around and it was not going away. By the 1960s, traditional Methodism was on the increase; and its adherents were puzzled, confused, and sometimes angered by the approach of Sunday school material that seemed more interested in life situations, the modern world, and becoming well-adjusted, than in communicating the faith.

Curriculum sales during this period were propped up by a constant pushing of the denominational loyalty button. “True Methodists” used only Methodist materials, which were theologically liberal, educationally fashionable, and supposedly suited for every church and situation; large or small, urban or rural, of whatever cultural, theological, racial, or educational background. If churches did not like the material, it was not the material’s fault. The problem, according to the institutionalists, was a lack of training, poor attitude, or a misguided understanding of the true purpose of Christian education on the part of churches and teachers.

In 1967, Good News was organized as a voice for the evangelical constituency of the Methodist Church. In one respect, it might be said that pain over curriculum matters did more to launch Good News than any other factor. There was a widespread sense among evangelicals that the church, which had nurtured them in so many ways and through which they wished to minister for Jesus Christ, dogmatically insisted on the use of curriculum materials which did not reflect, and was sometimes openly scornful, of their own understanding of the faith. Still, the “Good News types,” being fairly traditional, remained among the strongest supporters of the Sunday school as an institution, at a time of social ferment when criticism from other factions dismissed the Sunday school as outmoded and irrelevant.

On April 18, 1969, at O’Hare Inn, Chicago, the first of a number of “dialogue” meetings were held between curriculum editors and representatives of Good News. The Good News group argued that the UM materials represented a theology that had long-since deviated from the church’s doctrinal standards, and that Sunday schools were in trouble.

In the July-September 1969 issue of Good News, twenty-three pages were devoted to “Our Curriculum Crisis.” There was a sense of desperation in the articles, particularly in regard to youth. Arguments were made that the church was in danger of losing a whole generation who were being denied a clear, compelling presentation of Christian truth. Today, the words sound prophetic.

In the January-March 1970 issue of Good News, Charles Keysor wrote an editorial entitled “Cyanide in the Church School.” The commentary was direct, strident, and confrontational. Erroneous teaching in curriculum materials was infecting and poisoning the entire church, he said. The intensity of the editorial, and a number of articles to follow, reflected the frustrations of United Methodists who could see no improvement in the materials.

One cause for alarm among Good News affiliates was the realization that numbers of United Methodists, including some of the church’s brightest and best, were defecting to more evangelical denominations. While the curriculum materials and the Sunday schools were not the only reason for the exodus, desire for forthright Christian teaching was the main reason given for many of the departures.

Church leaders quoted “studies” and denied that any significant exodus was taking place. One of the first official responses to Good News was offered by the editor of curriculum resources, and was entitled, “How to Quote Some of the Words—and Not Tell the Whole Truth.” This widely-circulated pamphlet from the early 1970s painted Good News people as basically right-wingers and irresponsible fundamentalists. According to the pamphlet, the resources were biblical and responsible. All theological points of view were represented and the church would resist pressure from unofficial groups, the pamphlet stated. Variations on this response were repeated time after time during the years that followed.

Despite these responses, numbers of persons—whether acquainted with Good News or not, whether identified as evangelicals or not—continued to ask questions. Why so very little Scripture memory work? Why were there no pictures of Jesus on the cross for elementary children? Why no mention of original sin or hell or wrath of God? Where was the way of salvation presented? Why were basic church doctrines like the Virgin Birth, or Christ’s Atonement for sin, or the Second Coming always presented with qualifying statements, if at all.

The 1972 doctrinal statement, with its emphasis on pluralism, gave evangelicals a new argument. The Discipline stated that the curriculum materials should be of such nature as to meet the needs of all groups in the church. The question now was: Did evangelicals qualify as a group? If so, what was being done to meet their needs?

The official response to “meeting the needs of all groups” was to incorporate evangelical writers from time to time, and include evangelicals in the planning process. Evangelicals argued that this did not “meet the needs” for literature with consistent quality that could be used without apology. Many former members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church were appalled by the curriculum that was thrust upon them in their merger with Methodism. There was even an argument made for an evangelical “track”—a separate line of materials that would be confessional in nature, consistent with the doctrinal standards, and would interpret the Scriptures from a supernaturalist frame of reference.

An opportunity for an evangelical “track” came with confirmation materials. Good News made specific suggestions as to how additional resources could service the needs of evangelicals. These were summarily rejected. Good News then prepared a text that was submitted for approval as supplemental material. This too was rejected with the explanation that studies showed there was no need either for revision or for additional materials, particularly of the type Good News was proposing. Good News proceeded to publish its popular We Believe confirmation materials, and has subsequently sold more than 200,000 units.

Dr. Frank Warden, then a member of the Good News board, proposed an extensive Bible study based on the Bethel Bible series. Curriculum people indicated they felt the church would not respond to such a serious study. Dr. Warden, on his own, then prepared the Trinity Bible Series for United Methodists that was immensely successful in several thousand UM churches. A decade later, the Curriculum Resources Committee finally responded to the expressed need and produced the Disciple Bible study which has been a bright spot in some otherwise dismal sales figures.

By the 1980s, Good News was involved in a number of other concerns—missions, funding patterns, theological education—and curriculum became a less-pressing issue. The need for materials that could be used in good conscience by evangelicals was still there, but there was the feeling that the official structures of the UM Church were unwilling or unable to address it. It was at that point that United Methodist evangelicals launched Bristol Bible Curriculum. At least there would be a UM-based curriculum alternative for churches.

Sales for the official curriculum materials continue to sag. From the published reports, there is no reason to believe that the committee, in an effort to determine the cause for the sales slump, ever bothered to speak to any of the number of former-United Methodists who have since found homes in Baptist and Nazarene churches. If they had, one assumes they would not have been so quick to blame the extraordinary curriculum decline on secondary issues such as photocopiers, the economy, and need for more staff persons.

Riley B. Case is pastor of St. Luke’s UM Church in Kokomo, Indiana, a Good News board member and a contributing editor.

Archive: Do We Still Need Missionaries?

by Steve | Jul 15, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Do We Still Need Missionaries?

By Dick McClain

As long as I can remember, I’ve been around missions and missionaries. I still recall when, as a seventh grader in Hong Kong, the need for world missions first hit home to me in a personal way. I was watching my dad’s slide show, “Hong Kong Harvest,” in our living room in Kowloon. A visitor was being introduced to ministry in the world’s most densely populated city. I had seen the presentation so many times before that if the tape recorder had malfunctioned, I could have finished the narration all by myself.

But that night was different. I began to cry as I watched the unfolding story, and knew then that my life had to be invested in helping people know Jesus.

It was a surprise to me years later to learn that not everyone in the church was enthusiastic about foreign missions—a hot topic of debate in the United Methodist Church. I’ve discovered since then that many people are often unclear about what is meant by missions. One school of thought seems to regard virtually everything the church does as “mission” (note: no “s” at the end of the word). Richard Niebuhr narrowed that concept only slightly when he described mission as “everything the church does outside its walls.” However, we need to discuss foreign missions with a sharper vision than Niebuhr’s.

I propose that we understand missions as cross-cultural Christian ministry that has as its aim the reaching of those who have no allegiance to Jesus Christ, and making them Christian disciples. Three concepts are central: cross-cultural ministry, focusing on those who have not come to faith in Jesus Christ, and the goal of making Christian disciples.

With this understanding in mind, we can distill several questions that swirl around the great missions debate.

Question #1: Why Missions?

If missions has to do with Christians seeking to reach across cultural boundaries in an effort to point others toward Jesus, then the question naturally arises, why should we be doing that? After all, missions are costly business! Is the need for this activity sufficient to justify the cost? In other words, do all people everywhere really need Jesus?

The answer to this question depends on how you answer several others. Who was Jesus? Was he the Son of God? Is he the only Savior of the world? Can people come to a saving knowledge of God outside of faith in him?

Suffice it to say that missions is rooted in several foundational convictions: the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ, that Jesus’ death on the cross was the only atonement for sin which God has provided, and that humanity is lost apart from faith in Jesus.

In his recent article “The Devaluing of Evangelism,” retired Bishop Louis Schowengerdt illustrated what happens when church leaders reject the uniqueness of Christianity, challenging the evangelistic imperative that believers have historically affirmed (Good News, March/April, 1993). As a result of such changes coming to mainline churches, there was a 46 percent drop in the number of missionaries sent out by the UM Church between 1962 and 1979, a 68 percent decline among the United Church of Christ, and a whopping 79 percent reduction in the Episcopal Church.

Nevertheless, not all of United Methodism has lost its vision for missions. In the face of the relentless retreat of official denominational mission programs, many United Methodists have felt forced to minister outside the official structures.

In fact, far more United Methodists are serving around the world as missionaries today outside of our church’s official structures than are serving through the General Board of Global Ministries.

I am always meeting up with those who do not accept the uniqueness of Jesus, or those who just don’t believe that the question of people’s eternal destiny even matters. I am often tempted to try to convince them to rethink their views. But that is no longer my main concern. Dr. Ralph Winter, founder of the U.S. Center for World Mission, challenged me several years ago to focus my energies on trying to mobilize evangelicals to act in a way that is consistent with our stated beliefs. Our Latin friends are correct in stating that orthopraxy (right action) is as important as orthodoxy (right belief). It does little good to say we believe the world needs Jesus if we don’t make every effort to make him known.

Question #2: Why Missionaries?

Behind this question are several others: Isn’t the church already in every country? Why not let the nationals do the work? Isn’t it very costly to send missionaries? Missions, yes; but are missionaries really still needed?

First of all, the love of Jesus should motivate us to send missionaries. When Melville Cox, Methodism’s first foreign missionary, was about to leave for Liberia in the early 1830s, a friend challenged what he believed to be Cox’s foolhardy plan. “If you go to Africa, you’ll die there!” his friend warned. “If I die, then you write my epitaph,” was Melville’s quick retort. Caught off guard, his friend responded, “But what should I write?” Cox’s thoughtful answer is inscribed today on a monument in his honor in Monrovia, Liberia: “Though a thousand fall, let not Africa be lost.”

As the apostle Paul expressed it, “Christ’s love compels us” (II Corinthians 5:14). You cannot love him, love the world for which he died, and not want to make him known.

Secondly, Jesus commanded us to go. The Great Commission was his last commandment. It ought to be our first concern!

A sentence from Clay Cooper’s Nothing To Win But The World burns in my heart: “He needs no call who has a command.” We don’t have to wait for a special call from God to get involved in missions. He has already called the church to go.

During the Gulf War, one of our young missionary families returned to their central Asian field where they work among an unreached Muslim people group. The city to which they were returning was rife with anti-American feeling. Thousands had marched in the streets in support of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. One supporter said to this young couple, “You must be incredibly brave to return to your country at this time.” The missionaries responded, “No, we are no more courageous than anyone else. For us it has nothing to do with courage. It is a simple matter of obedience. God has called us to go, and we have decided to obey him.”

A third compelling reason for sending missionaries grows from a clear understanding of the nature of the world in which we live. While some make much of the fact that the church already exists in every country, the world isn’t really divided up by countries. As Donald McGavran, father of the Church Growth Movement, has pointed out, the world is an intricate mosaic of people groups. For example, Ghana—a country the size of Pennsylvania—is made up of tribal groups speaking some 50 languages.

Jesus’ command was to make disciples of every “nation,” not every “country.” The Greek word for nation is ethne, from which we derive the word ethnic. His order was literally to go to every “people group” with the gospel.

Of the world’s 5.1 billion persons, 33 percent are (at least nominally) Christian. Forty-one percent have been “evangelized” but are still non Christian. (They have some access to a clear gospel presentation, even though they have not accepted it.) But that leaves one quarter of the world still truly unevangelized or unreached. One and one-third billion people have no access to churches, Bibles, missionaries, or religious broadcasts. They have virtually no opportunity to hear and accept—or reject—the gospel.

Just as important as the total number of unevangelized persons, however, is the number of unreached people groups. Some eleven thousand such groups (as defined by language, culture, or sub-cultural grouping) still have no culturally relevant church or Christian witness, or the Christian presence they do have is too small to be able to reach the rest of the group for Christ.

As long as there are thousands of unreached people groups and hundreds of millions of unreached persons, there will be a need for “outsiders” to bring the gospel to them. By definition, that means missionaries are still needed.

Summarizing his life ministry, the apostle Paul concluded that it had always been his ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known. As a matter of strategy, Paul targeted those who had never heard. The unreached people movement in modem missions employs the same principle. United Methodists would do well to get on board. Our denomination alone has three congregations for every unreached people group in the world. Think what God could enable us to do by way of finishing the task if every United Methodist congregation was committed to personally targeting one of the world’s remaining unreached groups.

Question #3: Why Us?

Granted, missionaries should be sent. But why from the United States? Don’t our colonial background and our imperialistic tendencies render us suspect—perhaps even fatally flawed—as missionary candidates (i.e. predominantly white, middle class, north Americans)? And besides, isn’t it too costly to send westerners as missionaries?

In response, we need to be clear about what ought not be our reasons for sending our missionaries. They must not go just to make themselves feel better. (Despite the hardships involved in living in other countries, it’s certainly possible for missionaries to be motivated toward missions by a desire to meet personal needs.) Nor should missionaries go because of some misguided notion that to do so is to make the “ultimate sacrifice” for God. Even more to the point, no north American should go because “those poor (i.e. ‘uncivilized’) people desperately need our help (i.e. our ‘enlightened’ western way of life).” There is no room for cultural arrogance in missions today. Those who go must see themselves as simply “one beggar showing another beggar where to find bread.”

We should praise God for the internationalization of missions that we are witnessing today. A century ago the word “missionary” was almost synonymous with “westerner.” Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. The churches of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have risen to the challenge of world evangelization in recent years, and are sending increasing numbers of cross-cultural workers to some of the neediest areas of the world. Still, there is ample justification for our sending forth missionaries.

Since the Great Commission was given to the whole church, we might better ask, “Why not us?” How can we exempt ourselves from the call to go and make disciples? Does the fact that it’s more costly to send westerners than missionaries from developing countries justify our “subcontracting” to the church in less affluent countries the task of sending their sons and daughters? Should we expect them to pay the price of separation from home and family and adjustment to new cultures, while we merely bankroll their effort from our place of ease in the west?

Time magazine (May 22, 1989), in an article entitled “Those Mainline Blues,” noted that “spreading the gospel abroad was once a quintessential mainline activity, but today evangelical agencies sponsor four-fifths of American Protestant missionaries.” I am convinced that our churches are in desperate need of a heightened world vision if they are to be spiritually revived. That vision cannot come, apart from a renewed commitment to sending forth laborers into the world’s harvest fields.

The bottom line is quite simple. God is still calling forth Christian men and women from the church in the U.S., and directing them toward missionary service. For them, going is a matter of simple obedience. For the rest of the church, obedience demands that we send them.

The countdown to A.D. 2,000 echoes louder with each passing day. Many “Great Commission Christians” have adopted the goal of completing world evangelization by the end of this second Christian millennium. The task can be finished. If all God’s people made Jesus’ last command their first concern, there could really be a viable Christian witness among every people, tongue, and nation by the turn of the century. Jesus didn’t give us an impossible task; just one that requires us to move forward on our knees, depending upon his Spirit.

Dick McClain is the director of missionary personnel for the Mission Society for United Methodists.

Archive: Can We Be Good Without God?

by Steve | Jul 14, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Can We Be Good Without God?

By Chuck Colson

Last December, newspapers ran a striking photograph of a group of people held at bay by armed guards. They were not rioters or protesters; they were Christmas carolers. The town of Vienna, Virginia, had outlawed the singing of religious songs on public property. So these men, women, and children were forced to sing “Silent Night” behind barricades, just as if this were Eastern Europe under communist rule instead of Christmas in America in 1992.

During the past 30 years we have been determined to secularize our society. Some months before the incident in Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lee vs. Weisman that a rabbi who delivered a very politically correct “To Whom It May Concern” prayer at a Rhode Island junior high school commencement had violated the constitutional rights of a 15-year-old student in the audience. The Court said, in effect, that the girl must be legally protected against listening to views she disagreed with. There was a time when it was a mark of civility to listen respectfully to different views; now you have a constitutional right to demand that those views are not expressed in your presence.

In another case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, visual religious symbols have been banned. Zion, Illinois, in the “heartland of America,” was forced to eliminate the cross featured in its city seal, because the Justices ruled it a breach of the First Amendment.

In education, the same kind of court-enforced secularism has been so successful that teachers may hand out condoms in school, but they are forbidden to display a copy of the Ten Commandments on a bulletin board. Students, meanwhile, may indulge in almost any kind of activity in school, but they are forbidden to pray.

The Supreme Court is not the only institution out to protect us from the “threat” faith poses. The media-assault upon religious believers has been fierce. Cardinal O’Connor has been excoriated by the New York Times for even suggesting that he might deny the sacraments to a pro-choice legislator. (This was the same New York Times that praised a Louisiana archbishop who refused to administer communion to a segregationist legislator in 1962.)

In February of 1993, the Washington Post featured a front-page article that characterized evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” If a journalist said that about any other group in America, he would be fired on the spot, but the Post didn’t fire anyone. It merely expressed surprise that many readers found the description offensive. A few days later, one of the bemused editors explained that they felt they were simply printing something that is “universally accepted.”

It is no wonder that Peter Berger, professor of sociology at Boston University, says that if you look around the world you will find the most religious country is India, and the most irreligious country is Sweden—and America is an interesting combination of Indians who are governed by Swedes.

A Post-Christian Society

These Swedes have done their job well. In 1962, polls indicated that at least 65 percent of all Americans believed the Bible to be true. In 1992, polls indicate that only 32 percent do, while 50 percent say that they actually fear fundamentalists. If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian society.

The process of shedding our religion began with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which exalted existentialism and a kind of “live-for-the-moment-God-is-dead-or-irrelevant” philosophy. Today, that 60s philosophy has become mainstream; it is in every walk of life. This is not to say that people aren’t going to church. Forty-four percent of the American people still attend religious services regularly. But we live in a Donahue-ized culture in which we sit and watch, hour by hour, the banality that passes for knowledge on television; and we rarely think about issues in terms of Judeo-Christian truth. We hear carolers singing “Silent Night” or an invocation at a public ceremony, and we are filled with trepidation; we are worried that we are infringing upon the rights of nonbelievers. We see the symbol of the cross, and we feel compelled to paint it out because it might violate the principle of separation between church and state. We exalt tolerance, not truth, as the ultimate virtue.

The City of Man

Can we really sustain the city of man without the influence of the City of God? St. Augustine argued that it was impossible.

Any society, especially a free society, depends on a moral consensus and on shared assumptions: What is ultimate reality? What is meaningful in life? By what standards should we be governed? These common values are the glue that holds society together.

In America, the glue is wearing pretty thin. We are in the middle of an identity crisis in which we are attempting to redefine our basic values all over again. We can no longer assume that right and wrong have clear meanings or that there is universal truth. After all, pollsters tell us that 67 percent of the American people say there is no such thing.

What we fail to realize, however, is that rejecting transcendental truth is tantamount to committing national suicide. A secular state cannot cultivate virtue—an old-fashioned word you don’t hear much in public discourse these days. In his classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the 19th century Russian novelist Dostoyevsky asked, essentially, “Can man be good without God?” In every age, the answer has been no. Without a restraining influence on their nature, men will destroy themselves. That restraining influence might take many abstract forms, as it did for the Greeks and Romans, or it might be the God of the Old and the New Testaments. But it has always served the same purpose.

Even before Dostoyevsky posed his timeless question, an 18th century German professor of logic and metaphysics, Immanuel Kant, had already dismissed it as irrelevant. God exists, said Kant, but he is separate from the rest of life—Over here are the things that we can empirically know; over there are things we can accept only on faith. What does that do to ethics? Kant’s answer was to separate them from faith. He also believed that we can, on our own, with only our rational capacities to depend upon, develop what he called the “categorical imperative.” He explained: “Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.”

This rational, subjective view is the basis of ethics being taught in nearly every school in America today, from Public Grammar School No. 1 to Harvard Business School. Students are never exposed to traditional moral teaching in school, only to rationalism. Pragmatism and utilitarianism are substituted for Judeo-Christian ethics, and students are taught that they have the inner capacity to do good as rational beings, apart from God.

Danger of Self-Righteousness

Nothing could be more dangerous. Let me give you a case study: Chuck Colson. I grew up in the Depression years. My dad, who was the son of a Swedish immigrant, used to tell me two things on Sunday afternoon. Although no one in my family had ever gone to college, he said, “If you work hard, you can get to the top. That’s the American dream.” And the second thing he used to say was, “Always tell the truth. No matter what you do in life, always tell the truth.” (One could not go through Watergate and claim much distinction for anything, but the fact was that I testified under oath 44 times and I was the only defendant who was not charged with perjury. My dad’s lesson stuck: tell the truth.)

I kept both of these pieces of advice in mind as I grew up, earned a scholarship to college and then went on to law school. I also remembered them when I joined a very successful law firm, and years later in 1969 when President Nixon asked me to come to work at the White House, I took everything I had earned and put it into a blind trust. (If you want to make a small fortune, let me tell you how: You take a large fortune and put it in a blind trust.) I did everything to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. I passed unsolicited gifts on to my employees. I refused to see people with whom I had practiced law or had made business deals. I really had studied Kant’s categorical imperative, and I knew that I would always do right.

What happened? I went to prison.

Why? Because we are never more dangerous than when we are feeling self-righteous. We have an infinite capacity for this feeling and for the self-justification that accompanies it. It was only when Jesus Christ came into my life that I was able to see myself for who I am. Indeed, it is only when we turn to God that we begin to see ourselves as we really are—fallen sinners desperately in need of his restraint and his grace.

Kant’s philosophy, like much Enlightenment thought, was based on a flawed view of human nature, which held that men are basically good, and if left to their own devices, will almost always do good things. It was also dead wrong in assuming that the categorical imperative could take the place of moral law. Just because men can think the right thing, it does not mean that they will heed it. Pierre, one of the central characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was torn by spiritual agonies. He cried out to God, “Why is it that I know what is right and I do what is wrong?” We can know what is right, but we don’t always have the will to do what is right.

How Shall We Live?

In books like Mere Christianity and Abolition of Man, the 20th century British Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, attempted to refute Kant and make a powerful intellectual case for the City of God that did not wall it off from the city of man. In an essay entitled, “Men Without Chests,” he drew an analogy between the spiritual life and the body, that sums up his objections to the supreme rationalism of the Enlightenment. The head, Lewis said, is reason, and the stomach is passion or appetite. The head alone cannot control the stomach. It needs the chest, which is spirit, to restrain our more base passions and appetites.

Yet after World War II, schools began to teach ethics based on subjective standards without transcendent moral truths. Lewis challenged this, writing, “We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” That is what we are doing in America today. We are taking away the spiritual element and abandoning morality based on religious truth, counting instead on our heads and our subjective feelings to make us do what is right.

In our zeal to accommodate our so-called enlightened and tolerant age, we have lost the ideal of public virtue. I am reminded of Samuel Johnson, who, upon learning that one of his dinner guests believed morality was merely a sham, said to his butler, “Well, if he really believes that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, let us count the spoons before he leaves.” Today, there aren’t any spoons left to count. Look at Washington, Wall Street, academia, sports, the ministry—all the spoons are gone because we can no longer distinguish between virtue and vice.

Recovering that ability depends on asking the right questions. Our brightest and best leaders are concerned with the question, “How shall we be governed?” But in the Book of Ezekiel the Jews asked, “How shall we live?” It doesn’t matter who governs if society has no spiritual element to guide it. Unless we learn how to live—as men with chests—we are doomed.

The City of God

I have seen this truth demonstrated most powerfully in the area in which I’ve been called to spend my life. I work with men and women in prison in 54 countries around the world. The crisis is grave. In Washington, D.C., for example, 46 percent of the inner city black population between the ages of 18 and 31 is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. America as a whole has the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, and for the last 25 years, the crime rate has gone up every year. We can’t build prisons fast enough. In the last seven years, we have seen a 120 percent increase in the number of murders committed by those between the ages of 18 and 20. According to some sources, 20 percent of all school children carry a weapon.

Criminologist James Q. Wilson, among others, has tried to identify the root cause of this epidemic of violence. When he began his inquiry, he was certain that he would discover that in the great period of industrial revolution in the latter half of the 19th century there was a tremendous increase in crime. But, to his astonishment, he discovered a decrease. And then he looked at the years of the Great Depression. Again, there was a significant decrease in crime. Frustrated by these findings, which upset all our preconceived notions, Wilson decided to search for a single factor to correlate. The factor he found was religious faith.

When crime should have been rising in the late 1800s because of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and economic dislocation, Victorian morality was sweeping across America. It was a time of intense spirituality. It was not until the conscious rejection of Victorian morality during the “Roaring” twenties that crime went up. This was the era when Sigmund Freud’s views were coming into vogue among “thinking” Americans: people weren’t evil, just misguided or mistreated, or they required better environments. Sin was regarded as a lot of religious claptrap.

The crime rate did not decline again until the Great Depression, a time when people banded together in the face of crisis. Wilson concluded, therefore, that crime was in large part caused by a breakdown of morality. Since 1965, the crime rate has steadily risen. In the same period, religious faith has waned. We have told people there are no absolutes and that they are not responsible for their own behavior. They are simply victims of a system that isn’t working anymore, and they don’t have to worry about it because the government is going to fix it for them. We thought that in this “brave new world” we could create the perfect secular utopia. But the secular utopia is, in reality, the nightmare we see as we walk through the dark, rotten holes we call prisons all across America.

In this context, it always amazes me when I listen to politicians say, “We are going to win the war on drugs by building prisons, appointing more judges, and putting more police on the beat.” During the seven months I spent in prison, there was not one night that I did not smell marijuana burning. If you can get marijuana into prison, with watchtowers, inspections, and prison guards, you can get it into a country. You can send the U.S. Marines to Columbia to burn all the fields, seal all the borders, and build all the prisons you want, but you won’t stop drug use in this country, because it isn’t a problem of supply; it is a problem of demand. When there is no greater value in the lives of so many people than simply fulfilling individual desires and gratifications, then crime and drug abuse become inevitable. The soaring crime rate is powerful testimony to the failure of the city of man, deprived of the moral influence of the City of God.

If we cannot be good without God, how do we sustain public virtue in society? We cannot do it through the instrument of politics. Alasdair MacIntyre, moral philosopher at Notre Dame, says that “Politics has become civil war carried on by other means.” Without moral authority to call upon, our elected leaders are reduced to saying, “We can’t say that this is right and that’s wrong. We simply prefer that you wouldn’t murder.” And crime and drug abuse are not the only results of this loss of moral authority. Forty-four percent of the baby boomers say that there is no cause that would lead them to fight and die for their country.

In the city of man, there is no moral consensus, and without a moral consensus there can be no law. Chairman Mao expressed the alternative well; in his view, morality begins at the muzzle of a gun.

There has never been a case in history in which a society has been able to survive for long without a strong moral code. And there has never been a time when a moral code has not been informed by religious truth. Recovering our moral code—our religious truth—is the only way our society can survive. The heaping remains of ash at Auschwitz, the killing fields of Southeast Asia, and the frozen wastes of the gulag remind us that the city of man is not enough; we must also seek the City of God.

Charles Colson, former special counsel to President Richard Nixon, is founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship, a ministry devoted to helping prisoners, ex-prisoners, victims, and their families. Born Again, Colson’s international best seller, detailed his conversion to Christianity in 1973. His other widely read books include Life Sentence, Loving God, Who Speaks for God?, Kingdoms in Conflict, Against the Night, The God of Stones and Spiders, The Body (with Ellen Vaughan), and Why America Doesn’t Work (with Jack Eckerd). He is the recipient of the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdale College.

Archive: Triumph over Tragedy

by Steve | May 11, 1993 | Archive - 1993

Archive: Triumph over Tragedy

By Dave Dravecky

How to Celebrate Life When it Throws You a Curve

Ever since playing catch with my dad, baseball had become my life. It’s what I watched on TV. It’s what I played. It’s what I read about when I spread out the Sunday paper.

My life was wrapped up in baseball. And my life as a ball player was wrapped up in my arm. It wasn’t long before that arm gained the attention of the neighborhood when they chose up sides for sandlot ball. Then, it wasn’t long before that arm caught the attention of the entire school, when, as a teenager, I pitched my first no-hitter. My name started showing up on the sports page, even in the headlines.

That arm attracted the attention of major league scouts, and the part of me that was my boyhood became my livelihood. My ability to provide for my family was based solely on what my arm could do on game day. The more strikes that arm could throw, the more I was worth. The more games that arm won, the more people wanted me on their team.

My arm was to me what hands are to a concert pianist, what legs are to a ballerina, what feet are to a marathon runner. It’s what people cheered me for, what they paid their hard-earned money to see. It’s what made me valuable, what gave me worth, at least in the eyes of the world.

A Small Lump

It started as a small lump on my pitching arm. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. It didn’t hurt. Then it got bigger.

At the advice of the team doctor, I saw a specialist. I’ll never forget that day. My wife Jan and I were in a room by ourselves, waiting for the test results. Through the door we could hear the muffled voices of the doctors.

“Look at that tumor!”

Tumor? The word hit me like a line drive. I looked at Jan. “I think we need to pray,” she said.

“Dear God,” I prayed, “we don’t know what’s happening, but whatever it is, help us get through it.”

What he helped us get through was cancer. The cancer was diagnosed as a desmoid tumor, and it had to be cut out. But in cutting out the tumor, the surgeon also had to cut out much of the surrounding muscle—the deltoid muscle, the very muscle that enabled me to lift my arm and throw.

I asked the doctor how long it would take before I could pitch again. He told me I would be losing the use of the most powerful muscle in my arm and that simple things like taking out my billfold would be hard. He told me I might be able to play catch in the backyard with my son.

Jan pressed him. “In other words, short of a miracle he will never pitch again.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said, “short of a miracle, he will never pitch again.”

Jan and I believed in a heavenly Father with big, strong hands that could fix anything. I told the doctor, “If I never play again, I know that God has someplace else he wants me. But I’ll tell you something else, Doc. I believe in a God who can do miracles. If you remove half of my deltoid muscle, that doesn’t mean I’ll never pitch again. If God wants me to pitch, it doesn’t matter whether you remove all of the deltoid muscle. If he wants me to pitch, I’ll be out there.”

After the surgery my arm burned from the memory of the surgeon’s knife. I was prepared for that. I had a prescription to push back the pain. What I wasn’t prepared for was the pain that shot through me one night as I watched the 1988 World Series, seeing my friend Orel Hershiser pitch the game of his career. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for myself, thinking that it could have been me out there. For the first time since the tumor was discovered, I cried.

In a few weeks I started physical therapy. After five weeks I could take the billfold out of my back pocket. After three months the doctor was so impressed with my progress he let me go to Arizona for the last two days of the 1989 spring training. I was put on a grueling regimen of exercises. I worked out five days a week from April through June. I felt like a prizefighter training for the heavyweight title. By midsummer my physical therapist said, “It’s a miracle, but you’re ready to pitch.”

Comeback

On August 10, 1989, I pitched my comeback game against the Cincinnati Reds. It was the highlight of my major league career. The crowd at Candlestick Park stood and cheered as I came onto the field. I couldn’t believe the outpouring of love I felt that day. The scoreboard framed their feelings with the words: WELCOME BACK, DAVE!

I waved my cap to the crowd, then stepped off the mound and bowed my head to give thanks. Each inning I took the field, they cheered. There I was, right smack in the middle of my biggest boyhood dream.

Five days after our 4-3 victory over the Reds, we traveled to Montreal. There was no stadium full of fans cheering me. There were no scoreboards welcoming me back. It was business as usual. For three innings I threw well and didn’t give up a hit. I felt no pain. By the fifth inning, though, I found myself rubbing my arm. It’s hard to describe the feeling. A tingling sensation. It ran halfway between my shoulder and my elbow.

During the next inning my control started slipping. The first batter hit a home run. I hit the second batter! The next batter up represented the tying run.

My catcher signaled for a sinking fastball, low and away, on the outside part of the plate. I nodded and started my windup. But when I brought my arm over my shoulder, I heard a crack next to my ear. It sounded like a brittle tree limb snapping in two. It was so loud, even the people in the stands heard it. The ball went sailing wildly somewhere between home plate and first base. Instinctively I grabbed my shoulder, but my forward momentum sent me tumbling face first to the ground, where I landed on my back. I groped for my arm, the pain knifing through it like a jagged blade. As odd as it sounds, I wasn’t discouraged as I lay there, because with the excruciating pain came a strange sense of exhilaration, a sense that God wasn’t finished with the story he was trying to tell with my life. It was weird. There I was gritting my teeth, biting back the pain, and I was thinking, Okay, God, what’s the next chapter gonna be? Then suddenly, I became overwhelmed at what God was doing in my life, and I realized what he was doing was much bigger than baseball.

“It’s broken,” I said, grimacing, and they brought out a stretcher and wheeled me off the field.

Everyone knew I would be out of the lineup for a while. But my teammates were all rooting for me, even my doctor. Another comeback was certainly possible. I had done it before; I could do it again.

Or so I thought.

My arm was set and put in a brace and a sling in time for me to watch the Giants clinch the 1989 championship that sent them to the World Series. After the final pitch of that game, I ran with my teammates to the pitcher’s mound and was caught in the crush of the celebration. Someone bumped me from behind, and my arm broke a second time. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why did I go out there? What was I thinking?

A ballplayer doesn’t think when his team wins the game that sends them to the World Series; he reacts. And I reacted.

While they were celebrating in the clubhouse, I was lying on the trainer’s table in tremendous pain.

On November 13, 1989, I announced my retirement from baseball, the game I had loved since I was seven years old.

The dream was over.

The decision to retire from baseball was a difficult one for me to reach. But when I did retire, I left with no regrets. Yes, my boyhood dream was over, but for me that dream was fulfilled the first day I put on spikes and suited up in a major league uniform. The rest—the all-star game, the two play-offs, the World Series—were all icing on the cake. And when I came back from cancer to play again, that was the candle on the cake.

Learning to Walk

On January 4, 1990, we discovered that the tumor had returned. My surgeon took the rest of the deltoid, leaving only a small portion intact to cover the curve of my shoulder. He also took 10 percent of my triceps, the muscle on the underside of the upper arm.

During my recovery someone asked if I would visit the children’s floor. I visited an eight-year-old boy who had had cancer since he was four. While I was there, he had to buzz the nurses for a shot of morphine to ease his intense pain. As the morphine was taking effect, we talked about baseball.

After a while he drifted to sleep, and his mother and I talked. “As a mother,” she said, with tears spilling from her eyes, “you long for heaven; then his suffering would be over.”

I came away from my time with that boy and his mother with an enormous sense of sadness. I was sad that we lived in a world where suffering was so ruthlessly impartial. I longed for a world where good people were rewarded with health and happiness, where bad people were the ones who got the terminal diseases and died young. But that’s not the world in which I found myself, as I next met Linda, a 39 year-old mother of three. She had had gastric problems since the summer of 1989, and had lost a lot of weight. The doctors didn’t discover her tumor until Thanksgiving. By that time it was too late to operate. Instead, she was given radiation treatments and chemotherapy.

From the way Linda talked, I could tell she knew the Lord in a personal and intimate way. We talked about her kids and her husband. Her face lit up as she told me how much she loved them, how much they meant to her. She was a good woman, and had everything to live for. But cancer is an indiscriminate disease, blind to good and evil, blind to a young boy or a mother of three.

A remarkable thing happened when I reached out to others in that hospital—a portion of my suffering was brought to an end. Not the physical part, but the mental and emotional part, which is often the worst kind. The relentless throb of introspective questions. The sudden, stabbing pain of realizing the meaninglessness of your life. The dull ache of loneliness.

God had stood by me so miraculously in my comeback from cancer, but now he seemed to be withdrawing. What was he doing? C.S. Lewis once said that God wants his children to learn to walk, and must therefore take away his hand. When raising our two children, Jan and I did the same thing. I remember Tiffany and Jonathan, still in diapers and clinging to our hands, trying to steady themselves on their feeble legs. To teach them to walk we would gradually have to withdraw our hand. Time after time they plopped down on their Pampers. But gradually they took a step on their own. Then two. They got a lot of bumps and bruises during that time, but they learned to walk. I wish I had read Lewis at the time. The rest of the quote would have brought me a lot of comfort: “And if only the will to walk is there He is pleased with their stumbles.”

That God could be pleased with my stumbles was so foreign to my mentality as a major league pitcher. If you stumbled on the mound, it resulted in either a balk or a stolen base. Every batter you walked sent your manager looking off toward the bull pen for a replacement.

“And if only the will to walk is there He is pleased with their stumbles.”

Could he be pleased with me even though I couldn’t perform? Even though I stumbled? Could God really love me like that?

Too much sin, too little faith

After speaking at a chapel service, I was approached by a man who told me I had cancer because there was sin in my life. He told me that the Holy Spirit revealed to him that God had a special plan for me—to be a preacher—but first I had to get rid of the sin. I asked him about some biblical characters who had undergone suffering: “What about Joseph? Was there sin in his life that kept him imprisoned for so long? Was there sin in Paul’s life when he prayed three times for the thorn in his flesh to be removed and it wasn’t?”

To me the issue was not whether I had sin in my life. I don’t think we need any great revelation to convince us that we’re sinners. The issue is not our character but the character of God. Is God the kind of God who gives people tumors when they sin? Does he dole out diseases when we fail him? Say, maybe, cataracts when we lust or hardening of the arteries when we hate. Does he punish us with leukemia and muscular dystrophy and blindness?

The Pharisees thought so. When they came across a blind man, they asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus responded by saying “neither,” and then proceeded to heal the man.

In moments of compassion like that, Jesus mirrored the picture of God revealed in Psalm 103:10-14:

He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.

Is that the picture of a father who takes a belt to his children when they spill their milk or wet their pants? Is that the picture of a God who gives people cancer when they sin? I don’t think so.

I didn’t get angry with the man. I felt sad that he was carrying around such a distorted picture of God. I wondered how that picture would get him through life when one day he would have to walk through his own  valley of suffering.

At another time a woman told me that God wanted all his children to be 100 percent healthy. But does he? What would God’s children grow up to be like if all the bumps in the road ahead of them were made smooth?

Cancer introduced me to suffering, and suffering is what strengthened my faith. Yet that woman implied I was suffering because I didn’t have enough faith. She seemed to be saying, Have enough faith and get the life you want. That struck me as making God into some kind of cosmic vending machine, where, if you pushed the right button, you would get a sweet life, free of suffering.

The Bible tells us to rejoice in suffering because it helps to shape our character (Romans 5:3-4). We all want character. Few of us, though, want to go through suffering to get it. The truth is we live in a fallen world and suffering is an undeniable reality in that world. But suffering is not a very pretty sight, and illusions are a lot easier on the eyes than reality. That’s why we look away from the bag lady on the street and look to the displays in the store windows. That’s why we prefer going to the movies instead of visiting hospitals and nursing homes.

It is by the mercy of God that even in a very great loss something can be found. That something is your own life.

The Decision To Amputate

On June 17, 1991, I had my three-month checkup. My arm was almost immobile. I could move it only at the elbow, and then only about 20 degrees. My shoulder was extremely sore. I experienced a few sharp pains, but most of the time it was a dull ache. It was as though the muscles had lost their memory and forgotten how to move.

My doctor came to the conclusion that it looked like it was time to amputate.

Up to this point I had hoped for the best, but I had prepared for the worst. Still the news was hard to take. The surgery was scheduled to be one week later.

The day after my amputation surgery I walked to the bathroom where, for the first time, the image of a one-armed man stared back at me from the mirror.

“Okay, God. This is what I’ve got to live with. Put this behind me; let me go forward.”

When the one-armed man looked back at me, there was peace in his eyes.

I cleaned myself up a little and took a walk down the hall. The nurse who had administered the anesthesia stopped me and said, “I really appreciated your prayer.”

“What prayer?” I asked.

“You prayed this beautiful prayer for the doctors and the staff. In fact you prayed twice.”

I was totally blown away. It was one of the things I really wanted to do before I went under, but I had no memory of my doing it. None.

Then she went on to say, “I’ve heard a lot of people praying for loved ones as they go to surgery, but that was the first time anyone has ever prayed for us.”

A couple of days later when I was walking around, pushing my IV, I came upon a family in the visitors’ room—waiting, paging mindlessly through last month’s magazines on the coffee table. I sat down next to the mother. Her husband had cancer throughout his body, and his prognosis wasn’t good.

Her son sat down beside me and asked: “Where do you get your peace?”

He had seen me in the halls talking to several of the patients and their families, and could tell that cancer hadn’t shattered my life. I could still smile and laugh. He knew something was different about me, but he didn’t know what.

I told him that Jesus Christ was the source of my peace. The entire family listened as I shared my faith. When I was finished, the woman said: “My husband has never done anything bad. He’s worked hard, been a good husband, a good father—yet he’s in here with cancer while all sorts of bad people are out on the streets, healthy.”

It’s hard to understand the suffering in this life, I told her, but this much I did know: You can’t blame God for it. Sooner or later our life on this earth is going to pass. Even the best lives someday come to an end. The only thing that will matter then is whether or not we’ll get to heaven. I believe in miracles, that God can and does heal people, but more important than that, I believe in the eternal hope of heaven. When I die that’s where I’m going, because heaven is my home.

Why Does God Make You Suffer?

Jesus said, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of the Father.” By saying that, is Jesus implying that God is the cause of the sparrow’s death? Is he saying that God sits in heaven and says, “Okay, it’s time for that pigeon with its nest on Second Avenue to die,” and then puts the poor bird in the cross hairs of his rifle and squeezes the trigger?

Sounds silly when we put it like that, doesn’t it? But that is what people imply when they say God picked them to have pain or chose them to suffer or gave them a disease.

So why do people say things like that about God? When C.S. Lewis lost his wife to cancer, for example, he said his faith collapsed “like a house of cards.” When it did, he questioned God’s character: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So, there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So, this is what God’s really like”‘ (A Grief Observed).

When suffering crashes into our lives, we have a hard time understanding how a good and powerful God can be at the helm of the universe. We fear coming to the conclusion: “So this is what God’s really like.”

To protect God’s character from the assaults of such questions, we may look to ourselves, saying the suffering came because we deserved it, because our sin was so great or our faith was so small. Or we may look to a higher good, saying that the benefits derived from the suffering outweigh the pain inflicted by it.

II Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles.” If we turn things around and say that the good which comes out of our suffering is the reason for our suffering, we confuse the character of God and turn things around there, too. He then becomes not the Father of all compassion but the Father of all chastisement; not the God of all comfort but the God of all trouble. That’s why our understanding of suffering is so important. It affects how we view God, which, in turn, affects every area of our life.

God willed a world that is as mysterious as it is majestic. I believe God rules over that world, but I don’t believe he gave me cancer. He allowed it. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know the purpose of my suffering. But I do know the results. When I compare the Dave Dravecky before cancer and the Dave Dravecky after, there’s no comparison.

I used to see everything in black and white; now I see the shades of gray in between. I used to be dogmatic and think there was an answer for everything; now I realize a lot of things don’t have answers. I used to think I could put God in a box; now I believe his ways are too deep for any box to contain. I used to depend on myself; now I depend more on God. I used to be preoccupied with my own needs; now I am learning compassion for the needs of others. I used to view Christ’s death on the cross intellectually; now I view it more emotionally. Through my own suffering I have become more aware of his. And I love him more as a result.

When You Can’t Come Back

What do you do when a part of your life is taken away from you forever? How do you adjust? How do you handle problems of self-esteem and depression? What do you do when no matter how hard you try, how much faith you have, how fervently you pray, things will never return to the way they were? What do you do when you can’t change the circumstances of your life?

What do you do when you can’t come back?

Sooner or later that’s a question we all have to face. For me it just happened to be sooner.

Tragedy pushes us through a one-way door, and once we pass through it, we can never return to the way life was before. A parent who loses a daughter to leukemia can never again go back to her bedroom and kiss that little girl goodnight or read her bedtime stories or kneel beside her bed and pray. A Vietnam vet with legs blown off can never go back to the sidewalks of his youth where he skipped so kiddishly and carefree. A woman who has been brutally raped can never go back to a time of innocence when, as a starry-eyed little girl, she dreamed of being swept off her feet by some handsome prince.

We can’t go back, no matter how much we ache to do so. All we can do is give thanks for what once was, for the good that was there, for the happy times that were had, for the laughter, for the love, for the memories that were shared. Then, saying goodbye to those times and to those loved ones, we can put our hand in the hand of him who gave orbit to the sun and the moon and the stars, and trust that he has a course for our lives as well.

Celebrating Life

I am so much more awake now, alert not only to eternity but to the gift of life here on earth. I am more aware of how precious each day is; how sacred a moment is; how it, too, is a gift, something that comes to us by grace, something that is to be held carefully and treasured.

So many people, it seems, let those sacred moments slip by without notice because they are preoccupied with the future, with their hopes and dreams and plans. We can be so intent on looking down the road at what we want out of life that we miss the beautiful scenery along the way. Playing catch in the backyard with your son. Reading to your daughter nestled next to you on the couch. Feeding the ducks on a walk around the pond with your wife.

The beautiful scenery along the way. It goes past our window in a blur as we push the speed limit to arrive at our destination. No thank you. I’ve been down that road before.

Looking back, Jan and I have learned that the wilderness is part of the landscape of faith, and every bit as essential as the mountaintop. On the mountaintop we are overwhelmed by God’s presence. In the wilderness we are overwhelmed by his absence. Both places should bring us to our knees; the one, in utter awe; the other, in utter dependence.

One by one the wilderness took from us everything we had depended upon in place of God. It took away our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our church, our friends, and even took us away from each other. All those things that we relied on for our source of strength were gone. We were forced to turn to God because there was nowhere else to turn. But at times in the wilderness he seemed to be distant, if not absent altogether.

In the wilderness, Jan and I learned to walk by faith rather than by sight. Where was Job when he said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”? In the wilderness of his own suffering. Where did David say, “O God, My God! How I search for you! How I thirst for you in a parched and weary land where there is no water”? In the wilderness when he hid from his enemies. Where did Jesus say, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”? In the wilderness when he fought off the temptations of the devil.

It was in the wilderness, too, that Jan and I learned to trust God, even though at times every visible trace of him had vanished. The spiritual starkness of the wilderness was what was so difficult to deal with. But we finally came to the point that Habakkuk did when he prayed: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights”(Habakkuk 3:17-19).

Jan and I can’t say we had the feet of a deer as we went through the wilderness. Ours were a lot more clumsy than that. But I can honestly say we had the will to walk. In our heart of hearts we wanted to please God, to trust him, to love him, to obey him.

And I truly believe he was pleased.

Even with our stumbles.

This article is taken from the book, When You Can’t Come Back by Dave & Jan Dravecky with Ken Gire. Copyright © 1992 by Dave & Jan Dravecky. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

Q&A Good News Interview

Good News interviewed Dave Dravecky after a recent speaking engagement sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the University of Kentucky’s Wesley Foundation, and the Cool Cats Ice Hockey Club.

In the midst of all your problems with your arm, your wife Jan was dealing with severe depression and stress, which ultimately caused a chemical imbalance in her system. How did you handle this?

I first had to realize my lack of understanding and compassion. I had to see my own insensitivity. It wasn’t until I went through my own depression that I could relate to the depression my wife was experiencing. After all, I was going through a physical problem, and I was sucking it up. She couldn’t do that. When I went through my own depression, I began to realize, in a small way, how I had been lacking in understanding and compassion toward Jan.

Going through all of this allowed me to begin to see more clearly the kind of pain and suffering that goes along with dealing with cancer. It’s not just the physical affliction, and it’s not just the individual who has cancer. It affects the spouse too. And it’s the depression, it’s the anxiety, it’s the fear, it’s the doubt. It’s those questions that come into your mind that somehow as a Christian you push aside, because you’re supposed to be above having to deal with them. That’s a bunch of baloney.

When you read the Bible and look at the men and women—in particular David, the prophet Jeremiah—they experienced depression, they experienced suffering. Ultimately, they ended up realizing that it was only God whom they could trust to give them the strength to get through what they were going through.

They had to experience anguish first to realize their weakness. In my own particular case, I thought my weaknesses were my strengths: not being emotional, being the tough guy, dealing with it, this whole athletic mentality of hanging tough and sucking it up. “What do you mean you can’t get up and walk! Pick up your bed and walk. Don’t tell me you can’t do it. Do it!”

It was in seeing that those things are weaknesses instead of strengths that I learned and began to understand the whole issue of why I’m really here, and why I’ve gone through what I’ve gone through. And that is to reach out and help people in the midst of their suffering, to give them the hope that brings true peace and true joy in the midst of difficulty.

How about your kids? How has your experience affected being a dad?

I have a much greater appreciation for my role as a father, my role as a husband. I realize now, more than ever, my greatest ministry is to my wife. In that ministry, when the two of us are one, as the Scriptures say, then we can have a strong influence on our children if we’re willing to give our lives to them.

Part of the problem with raising a family is the dilemma between the role of financial provider—house, food, clothing—and the role of spiritual provider. There is a real downplaying of our spiritual accountability; we want to let the church take care of it, we want to put our children in a private Christian school if we can afford it, instead of taking the responsibility. One valuable lesson that Jan and I have learned in going through this process is the value of our family, because it pulled us closer together when we were struggling. It gave us a unique opportunity to be able to give our kids some golden nuggets that they can carry with them when they are confronted with adversity as they walk down their path of life.

Ultimately, there are no pat answers. Through our lives, I hope we can express to our kids that we really do mean it when we say we trust in God. We try to live that before them.

What are you teaching your kids about suffering? They understand and know a loving God. They understand Jesus Christ suffered for them, but watching their dad go through all of this—how do you explain it to kids who don’t understand the complexities of life?

We have tried to keep it as simple as possible. People make the gospel a very complicated concept when in fact it isn’t! We tried to approach this by being completely honest with our children. When they asked questions we didn’t have answers to, we told them, “We don’ t know, but we still know that God is in control. How do we know that? Tiffany, Jonathan, let’ s look and read in the Bible where it says that God is in control. Let’ s go to the Scriptures and show you there! It’s okay if you don’t understand it all. You just have to trust that the Bible will help us get through this.”

It has helped us to get through.

We also tried to teach them to know and understand that mom and dad are here for a reason—always available to them when they have struggles. God uses people in this vast universe. He uses people to bring about the comfort that we seek through a relationship with God.

Because we can’t see God, we can’t feel him or touch him, how in the world do we know that God exists? Well, we have the Bible, which is his written word. The only additional means by which we can experience God is through the lives of other people. If God can use a pharaoh as an instrument to free the Israelites from bondage and slavery in Egypt, then he can use anyone to be an instrument of healing or comfort, whether he’s a Christian or not.

It seemed so unbelievable that some Christians felt comfortable enough to tell you that your cancer and amputation was caused by sin in your life or because of a lack of faith. If we do this to Christians, what is the rest of the world getting from us?

The thing that was so comforting to both Jan and me was that we didn’t get angry with people. They were quite sincere, God-fearing, wonderful, loving, concerned, caring people. They just didn’t know their Bible. When we get messed up—and this is where Christians have really been a poor example—we try to make God fit into our neat, little box and say, “Ok God, this is how you’re to operate, because this is what I believe you say or do in your operating.”

Wait a minute! God is the creator of the universe. How in the world is he going to fit into my box? He just doesn’t! So, we have to allow God to work freely in his universe.

Many times, we’ re not going to understand fully why things happen the way they do. However, we do understand that God in his sovereignty is going to work things out for good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose. God is going to use those things, those trials, or whatever takes place in our life, to draw us closer to him. If we could just come to grips with that, instead of always praying, “God, lift the burden from my back so I don’ t have to go through this stress, this struggle. I don’t have the strength to go through it.”

What we don’t realize is that God has given us all the strength we need to go through it, through him. If we start to pray for a stronger back, I think we would be a much greater light in this world of darkness.